Autotag your MP3 files with MP3Scrub

It's been bothering me for a while that my MP3's didn't all have album art when I was looking at them on my phone. I just kept looking at the default note image on quite a few of the artists I had. It was really getting annoying because I'm all about eye candy. After countless searches, and wasted time trying other software to clean up my collection of over 5500 songs, I found MP3Scrub.

It has a very simple interface, and "scrubs" your MP3 tags to clean them up and lable them properly. Most of the album art comes when you RIP a CD or download music but if it doesn't Winamp can find it pretty quickly... once it's tagged correctly.

The link below will begin the download for you, unzip the file to your desktop and double click the mp3application Application to start it. Then click the magnifying glass to load your music directory. Once it's loaded click "Action" then "Clean Tags". The software uses libraries on the internet to find the right tags for your music and your library is now "scrubbed" and clean!

MP3Scrub

The HTC Inspire 4g coming Sunday

... and I'll be getting one!

The HTC Inspire 4g is the first 4.3" touchscreen phone offered by ATT and it's a powerhouse of a phone. 2nd generation Snapdragon Processor, 768mb of RAM, 4gb of internal memory and comes with an 8gb micro-sd card which can be replaced with up to a 32gb micro-sd. It runs on Android 2.2 or "Froyo", and boasts the latest version of Sense which looks to be very nice. For those of you that have iPhones and like the remote wipe option, htcsense.com allows you to track your phone should it be misplaced or stolen, lock it, or wipe it from any computer. If you lose it in the house somewhere you can make it ring loudly... even if it's on vibrate.

There's a lot of buzz going around with dual core processor phones coming out later this year and a couple including the Atrix will be available by next month. Yea, dual core sounds cool, but in reality the phones are only designed to use one core at a time unless your multitasking, say surfing the web, email and playing a 3d game at the same time. The game will take 1 core, and the other apps will run on the other. So do you get an increase in speed? Not really, but it might be slightly more efficient. I certainly don't need that now. When the technology is better and there is software out there that will really utilize it, then maybe I'll think about upgrading again, but I don't expect that to happen until next year.

ATT is expected to release around 20 more phones before the years end, but if you're ready for a new phone now, I don't see how you can go wrong with this one. I've always been a big fan of Google and I'm excited to be getting this phone on Friday.

How I remove fake antivirus programs / malware

Lately it seems there is a rash of fake Anti-Virus programs going around and some of them look pretty convincingly real. Nobody knows how they get them, but they appear on the computer and warn you that your computer is infected and if you pay them some money to activate the program it will remove them. At the same time this disables your real antivirus software, and prohibits you from being able to install anything else to remove it. They come with many different names, Security Suite, Antivirus 2011, Antivirus Live, MS Antivirus and Spyware Protect to name just a few.

For those of you who are currently struggling with this, or for those of you who might end up with it, here's how to get rid of it yourself using free software.

If you're lucky enough you can boot into safe mode and run SuperAntiSpyware (free from Download.com) and clean it up. Then just run a couple of scans with SAS and your AntiVirus software after updating both and be done with it.

If not, here's the steps I take:

Download the following programs to a flash drive from another computer:

Rkill (there are 4 versions, get all 4 from BleepingComputer.com)

SuperAntiSpyware (download.com)

TrendMicro Housecall (trendmicro.com/housecall)

Combofix (http://www.combofix.org)

Now go back to your infected computer and close any running programs you were using when the malware poped up. Run Rkill.scr This is a screensaver file, so hopefully the Malware won't recognize it and prevent it from running. If it does, try the other versions, one should work. This should kill the program from running and pop up a text file with the location of the malware file it killed. Navigate to that folder and delete the file it specifies. BE SURE not to delete the wrong file!

Now you should be able to install and update SuperAntiSpyware. Run a full scan with this.

At the same time launch the Trend Micro Housecall scanner. It will update itself, then follow the prompts to start the scan.

One will finish before the other and prompt you to reboot but wait for the other to finish, it will ask you to do the same. Reboot your computer and you should be clean.

If you still have problems run ComboFix on your machine. This takes a while, but scans your computer and removes malware efficiently, and will even create a restore point for you on Windows XP machines or newer.

Always update your local Antivirus software and run a full scan after this to be sure that there are no remaining files infecting your computer. If you don't have an antivirus program, Microsoft Security Essentials is a good and free antivirus program that actually provides LIVE protection. AVG did not the last time I used it. (microsoft.com/security-essentials)

Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for anything that happens to your computer. These are the steps I take to remove malware and it's worked for me on many, many computers.

DIY Digital Photo Frame

This is something I read about on Lifehacker and just happened to have an old laptop sitting under a bookshelf collecting dust. I've also been wanting one of those digital picture frames, but $100 for a 7" screen just wasn't worth it to me. It took me about a week to find the right version of linux that would just run on it since this laptop has no ethernet port (to update drivers etc) and the flash drive wouldn't recognize either. Linux Puppy is what worked, and after modifying some files to alter the display settings (no screensaver, no standby or power save mode) then completely tearing the thing down to a pile of screws, a motherboard and a monitor I have a new digital photo frame.

The benefits of this laptop are that it has a 5gig hard drive, lots of space for a ton of pictures. It's already setup on the wireless network, so all I have to do is plug a pcmcia card in it and drag the new images over and add them to the slideshow. A 14" display. It was free. And I only spent about $25 for a glue gun and the frame.

Dell Latitude CPx:

After cutting the matting on the frame and the backboard, I put down the screen inside on the matting and hot glued it to the matting. Then put the backboard down over it.


Added the motherboard and hot glued that into place with some spacers I made out of my kids popsicle sticks they use for their projects. Also had to secure the hard drive since it was originally held in by the frame.


Cut up some coat hangers to use for a stand

Plugged it in, turned on the sildeshow and I'm rockin!

Using the Wii as a video/audio server

I've been trying to find ideas on how to get my music library on my PC over to my home theater system. I have an Omnifi Media Server, but it doesn't do video, so that's been my quest. Today I came close... still don't have the theater speakers included, but I figured out how to play music and videos from my computer over my wireless network and into the TV from the Wii.

I found a link mentioning Orb server, which I'd used before but had forgotten about. Orb basically streams your content over the internet so you can access it anywhere you have an internet connection. I've been using Winamp Remote for quite some time to get my music remotely, which is also Orb software, so this is what I stuck with.

All you need now is the Internet Channel on your Wii and you're all set. Navigate to your remote music, ie: www.winamp.com/remote and use the mobile display. Don't forget to turn the autohide on the wii menu, and you'll have full screen streaming media.

edit:
After playing with streaming video on my Wii I discovered that there was a pretty heavy buffering going on and the movie was jumpy and would stop a lot to catch up. I did a little more research and found that I could up the streaming rate on Winamp Remote which so far seems to help a lot.

To do this, open up your Winamp Remote through your Wii internet browser www.winamp.com/remote and get into your settings. Turn off the speed test and change the default 1500k to something higher, right now I'm at 6000k. I doubt I'm getting that, but I'm playing with the settings.

I'll update again when I dial it in.

edit II:
After some playing around with that, I decided to try the original ORB software on my laptop, I liked it much better on the TV screen so I loaded it on the main computer as well. It has a different layout which I think looks nicer, unless your into the black thing, and it has some more options. The quality of the video still isn't great, but it's good enough for me and the kids. And the Wii's version of Flash is 7 even though the latest is 9. (something to do with proprietary code).

Also, both versions are supposed to automatically detect the LAN and stream locally... however I wasn't seeing this. After some more research I found that you have to open up a couple of ports on your router other than 80 in order to stream over your LAN.

If you have a firewall on your router or a software firewall, add these ports, it will make your video streaming much faster.
Orb-TCPReal- 554
Orb-UDPReal-13398

Have fun!

Email attachments "Cannot create file"

Another user on the network was having issues opening .txt files on her computer. Word docs, PDF files and pretty much everything else would open, but the .txt files were getting an error that they could not be "created".  

It seems the problem is that the temp folder is located on the server, and somewhere along the line the permissions had changed. Fortunately there's a quick fix for this, which doesn't seem to have any drawbacks as of yet. A quick edit in the registry to change the file path from the server to the local hard drive and the problem is gone. 

Here's the link to Microsoft with the solution: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305982

Windows XP low disk space error

One thing that I've had to tackle lately which took some research was a "low disk space" error that kept popping up on an XP Pro machine on our network. The user only had about 10gigs of documents/images etc on his computer, but his 80 gig hard drive was almost completely full.

After some research I figured out that it was the offline synchronization folders which were taking up all that space. Seems that databases are created for the sync purposes and those databases were getting quite large.

To figure this out follow these steps:

click Tools
Folder Options
View tab
Select "View hidden..."
Uncheck "Hide protected Operating System files"

Go to the folder: C:/windows/CSC and check the file size of that folder... too big?

This is the folder that contains the databases for offline synchronization.

Re-initialize the database and sync process. When I did this, it simply recreated the databases and no data was lost... but it's always good to create a backup just in case.

Click on

Tools / Folder Options and the Offline Files tab

hold CTRL and Shift and click the Delete Files button, it will confirm that you want to re-initialize the offline folders. Click yes.

MS Has the link with more instructions here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/230738

After doing this, I freed up about 50gigs of space on the hard drive, and created a happier user.

As always, do this at your own risk, this was my experience, but might be different from user to user, and OS to OS. If the computer is not using Offline Synchronization then this probably won't help.